Terms and Conditions

By using and/or accessing this website, you agree to be bound by our terms. These terms and conditions together with our Privacy Policy forms a written contract between you and The Globaloptimist and will govern our relationship, your use of our website and/or services. When we refer to “our website” we mean all our websites, mobile sites, emails, social media platforms or any other technology or mechanism you may use to interact with us. “Services” refer to any products, goods, services or functionality offered, owned or operated by The Globaloptimist.

ABOUT OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS

You can either be an anonymous visitor, registered user, or subscriber or a nominated subscriber to our website; it may differ depending on the nature of your subscription and on the platform you are using. A registered user is a user that has registered on our platform and may get access to free content and free features. A subscriber is a user that has subscribed and paid a subscription fee and will get access to all content and paid features. An anonymous user of our platforms is neither a registered user or subscriber. In these Terms “users” refers to anonymous users, registered user and subscriber.
A subscriber may be a natural person or a legal entity.

The general use of our Services, Platforms and any content on our Platforms is governed by our Terms.

“Content” refers to any information, data, files, text, software, music, sound, photographs, graphics, images, video, messages, comments, hyperlinks or tags and other material appearing on our Platforms or Services and all applicable copyrights, trademarks, patents, logos or other intellectual property rights displayed on our Platforms or Services.

We may amend the Terms from time to time. Any new version of the Terms will be published on our Platforms and will become effective from the date that we first published it. It is your obligation to visit our Platforms on a regular basis in order to determine whether any amendments have been made. By continuing to use our Platforms and/or Services after we published changes to the Terms, you agree to be bound by the changed Terms.

Some of our Platforms and/or Services may contain additional rules or terms from time to time, which may be relevant to specific Services you use or subscribe to. By using those Services, you agree to be bound by such additional rules and/or terms.

CONTENT OF THE GLOBALOPTIMIST

You may not, unless with our express consent,

  • reproduce, publish, perform, broadcast, make an adaptation of, sell, lease, offer, expose or otherwise transfer or use for commercial purposes any Content;
  • decompile or reverse engineer the Content, or reduce the Content to any format other than the format in which they were delivered;
  • incorporate the Content into any other content for whatever purpose;
  • remove any legal notices (copyright, trademark or other proprietary rights notices) in or on the Content; or
  • frame any portion of a web page that is part of our Platforms or Services.

You may retrieve, store, cite or refer to or print Content from any of our Platforms or Services for educational, research, non-commercial, private or personal use only, as provided for under South African copyright law.

Use of Content in electronic clipping services or personalised news services shall only be allowed if such electronic clipping service or personalised news service

  • does not copy or provide the whole article, as it appears on our Platforms or Services, but only provides a short summary of the contents of the article
  • acknowledges us as the source of the Content and acknowledges writers, journalists, photographers and third-party agencies as they are acknowledged on our Platform;
  • provides a correct and working hyperlink to the source of the Content or article on our Platform; and
  • includes the date upon which the Content was sourced from our Platforms in the summary of the Content.

Use of Content by news aggregators shall only be allowed if such news aggregators

  • only provide the thumb nail and headline as it appears on our Platforms or Services;
  • provide a correct and working hyperlink to the source of the Content or article on our Platform; and
  • acknowledge us as the source of the Content and acknowledge writers, journalists, photographers and third-party agencies as they are acknowledged on our Platform.

The caching of our Platforms shall only be allowed with our written permission and if

  • the purpose of the caching is to make the onward transmission of the Content from our Platform more efficient;
  • the cached Content is not modified in any manner whatsoever;
  • the cached Content is updated at least every 12 (twelve) hours; and
  • the cached Content is removed or updated when so required by us.

You may quote small and reasonable amounts of Content available from our Platforms only if such quote is placed in inverted commas, the author is acknowledged and a hyperlink to the quoted Content is provided as a footnote to such quote.

All licenses and/or permissions granted in terms of this clause are provided on a non-exclusive and non-transferable basis and may be terminated or cancelled by us at any time without giving reasons, therefore.

YOUR CONTENT

You will retain ownership of any original Content which you may upload, transmit or store when using our Platforms or Services.
The Globaloptimist will own all compilations, collective works or derivative works created by us which may incorporate your Content.

You grant us an irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide and royalty-free right and license to use, publicly display, publish, publicly perform, reproduce, distribute, broadcast, adapt, modify and promote on any medium, your Content which you may upload or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas on our Platforms or through our Services.

Any content you transmit or post to publicly accessible areas on our Platforms or Services shall be considered non-confidential and non-proprietary. We shall have no obligations with respect to such Content.
You agree to adhere to our User Rules when posting or transmitting any Content or material to our Platforms or Services.
All information that you upload or share with us, must be true, accurate, relevant to our times and complete.

You warrant that you are authorised to supply such information to us. In order to protect the integrity of our archives, we do not allow you to remove content provided by you after it has been published on any of our Platforms or publications.

THRID PARTY CONTENT

Our Platforms or Services may include, from time to time, Content or advertisements from third parties and/or external links to other websites possessing their own content (“Third Party Content”).

    You acknowledge that the Third-Party Content
  • is beyond the control of The Globaloptimist and that any reliance on any representation, statement or information contained in Third Party Content is at your risk;
  • cannot be verified by The Globaloptimist, and that The Globaloptimist cannot be expected to determine its accuracy or reasonableness; and
  • may contain representations, statements or information which does not represent the views, opinions or beliefs of The Globaloptimist, its associates, directors or employees.

USER RULES

These User Rules must always be read together with our Terms, which will always apply to your use of our Platforms and/or Services. We expect all Content and activities on our Platforms and/or Services to comply with our Terms and specifically these User Rules. We do not pre-screen or monitor user generated Content, but we reserve the right to remove any Content that does not comport with our User Rules. You may be held legally liable for Content that you post or upload to our Platforms or Services or by using our Communication Facilities. Unless the context clearly indicates the contrary, any term defined in our Terms when used herein, shall bear the same meaning as defined in our Terms.

    In these User Rules
  • Abusive Content means Content which we consider to be defamatory, discriminatory, obscene, lewd, offensive, threatening, abusive, harassing, harmful, hateful, hate speech, or which contains child, explicit or violent pornography, Content which may be harmful to minors, religious or racial slurs or threatens or encourages bodily harm or the like or which may violate any person's rights, regardless of whether such Content is accessed, transmitted, propagated, distributed, created or stored in a public or private context;
  • Communication Facilities includes (without limitation) our email, instant messaging, data messages, SMS, chat rooms, discussion boards, albums, communities, classifieds and similar facilities or technologies used for the purposes of communicating in real-time or otherwise with other persons, whether they are The Globaloptimist subscribers or not;
  • Destructive Code means any computer code which
    • is designed to disrupt, disable, harm, or otherwise impede in any manner the operation of any software, hardware or network (generally referred to as “viruses”, “Trojan horses” or “worms”);
    • would disable any software, hardware or network or impair in any way its operation based on the running out of a period of time, exceeding an authorised number of copies, advancement to a particular date or other numeral (generally referred to as “time bombs”, “time locks”, or “drop dead” code);
    • would permit any person to access any software, hardware or network of any other person without consent (generally referred to as “trap”, “access code”, “back door” or “trap door” codes); and
    • any other similar harmful, malicious or hidden procedures, routines or mechanisms which would cause such software, hardware or networks of any person to cease functioning or to damage or corrupt data, storage media, programmes, equipment or communications, or otherwise interfere with operations;
  • Misrepresentation includes (without limitation)
    • actions designed to deceive, mislead, defraud or otherwise make misrepresentations to any person regarding any fact or circumstance;
    • impersonating or attempting to impersonate or otherwise misrepresenting your identity to any person for whatever purpose;
    • altering the content of communications received by you and thereafter forwarding same to others without indicating the nature of the alterations; and
    • forging or otherwise manipulating origination details and data on any electronic data message generated by our Communication Facilities with a view to disguising or deleting the origin of anything posted or transmitted using our Communication Facilities including, without limitation, the use of “Socks Proxies”, “EZBounce”, “Vhosts”, “BNC's” and/or any other software or hardware methods used to disguise or misrepresent your own IP address;
  • Spam or Spamming includes (without limitation) the posting or cross-posting of unsolicited communications using our Communication Facilities; imitating or impersonating another person or his email address, or creating false accounts for the purpose of sending spam; sending unauthorized mail via open, third party servers, sending emails to users who requested to be removed from a mailing list; selling or exchanging the email address of any person without that person’s consent;
  • System Abuse means any conduct which does or may
    • damage, impair, overburden or disable any system of any person (including us) using our Platforms or Services;
    • interfere with any other person's use of the Internet or of our Platforms or Services;
    • compromise or tamper with the security of our or any other person's software, hardware, systems, networks, Platforms or Services including (without limitation) Spamming and mass messaging, the use of software and technologies known as “floodbots”, “clonebots”, “automated client”, nuking and nuking tools.

GENERAL RULES

    You agree that, when you use our Platforms or Services, you will not
  • do anything which violates any of the Terms;
  • Spam our Communication Facilities;
  • make any Misrepresentation;
  • post, upload or transmit any Abusive Content;
  • replicate or store Abusive Content on any of our Platforms or Services;
  • do anything that does not comply with generally accepted Internet etiquette including (without limitation) the excessive use of capitalised text, the use of inflammatory or antagonistic criticism (“flaming”), or wastefully and unnecessarily including previous communications in any postings;
  • commit fraud;
  • violate or infringe the intellectual property rights, contractual or fiduciary rights, privacy or publicity rights of another;
  • perform System Abuse;
  • propagate, distribute or transmit Destructive Code, whether or not damage is actually caused thereby;
  • repeatedly post gratuitous off-the-topic communications;
  • read and act upon any communication which was not intended to be received by you or fail to delete such communication;
  • gather personal or commercial information including (without limitation) e-mail addresses and/or names from any Internet facilities, whether managed by us or by any third party, for
  • commercial, political, charity or any other purpose without the consent of the owners of such information;
  • reproduce, replicate, copy, alter, modify, create derivative works of or sell or re-sell any of
    • our Content or Services or any part thereof including (without limitation) websites and web pages, or any services that constitute the provision of telecommunications services in terms of applicable legislation; or
    • the information or data contained in our Platforms or Services;
  • use any of our Platforms or Services for commercial purposes other than those provided for hereunder, including (without limitation), reformat and display the results of a search; mirror our home page or result pages on your website, or add a The Globaloptimist search box on your website. If you want to make commercial use of our Platforms or Services, you are required to enter into an agreement with us;
  • repeatedly or in a rapid manner transmit Content in such a manner as to have the effect of harassing a recipient;
  • transmit Content that you do not own or do not have the right to publish or distribute, whether under law or contract;
  • access any of our Platforms or Services or any similar service of a third party or any network without authorisation or through hacking, password mining or any other means;
  • perform or encourage any illegal activities including (without limitation) promoting or facilitating access to, use of or sale of dangerous substances or devices;
  • fail to comply with applicable domestic, national and international laws, rules and regulations;
  • disrupt the normal flow of dialogue or negatively affect the ability of other users to engage in real time exchanges;
  • help any third party to do any of the above.

We provide certain Services that allow you to “chat” or contribute Content to blogs (weblogs or online journals) and chat rooms, discussion boards, communities and forums.
You may not use the Blog and Chat Service for the purpose of advertising or marketing any business, product or service.

Any Content that you provide to a Blog and Chat Service enters an open, public forum, and is not confidential. You should therefore be careful when deciding to share any of your personal information in a Blog and Chat Service.
By disclosing personal information such as your name and email address in a Blog and Chat Service, you acknowledge and understand that this information may be collected and used by other persons to communicate with you.
We knowledge of the Content on the Blog and Chat Service. We also do not condone, approve, endorse or support any Content on the Blog and Chat Service.
You accordingly use the Blog and Chat Service at your own risk and indemnify us against any liability, loss or damage resulting from the use of the Service.
We however reserve the right to monitor or moderate the Blog and Chat Service at any time should we deem this necessary. If we are of the view that you are in breach of any of our Terms, we may, without notice to you

  1. remove any Content; or
  2. stop or suspend your use of the Blog and Chat Service and/or any other Services.